Note that all of the pandas being sold by sergegurski0 and samborskimint appear to be fakes, but those sellers aren't filtered because I'm not 100% convinced they know their coins are fake. It might be helpful to send them a message to warn them their coins are fake. If they persist in trying to sell them anyway after being informed they're fake, then they are knowingly selling fakes and they can be filtered.

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 1232 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 1.32 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

Nanjing 2013 copper God of Wealth NGC 69 2 coin set for $160 Buy-It-Now with a Best Offer option: 221996670881. From luckmoneyro. He originally listed this for $140, then raised the price to $160. My conclusion? Offer $140 for the set, of course! What a crazy time we live in, when you can get investment grade coins with a mintage of 299 for $70 each. Other dealers are quite a bit more expensive for these coins.

1983 27 g silver panda sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price: 121870985608. Is it genuine? I hope so, because the buyer paid $1500 for it.

1986 silver Empress of China sold in a cheap auction: 201503005200. This was a pretty good price considering other sales for 69 grade hover around a price level a bit higher, near $90. Another one sold in a very cheap Buy-It-Now: 151951410181. This is about as low as it gets.

1995 1 oz silver panda Shenyang small date (microdate) NGC 67 sold in a cheap auction: 272103448938. I can't believe how cheap this was. A key 1995 panda! In 69 grade, they peaked at about $3000! I seem to remember selling one of my 67's for more than double this price. Some collector out there has a big smile on his face after bagging this one for peanuts.

With all the hubbub about the debasing of the 2016 pandas, I have been expecting all the extra attention to make pandas fashionable again. ebay is inundated with hundreds and maybe thousands of sales for the 2016 30 g silver pandas each week. I have been trying to form an opinion about how strong the market is. When I look at these older coins that cost practically nothing, I see weakness everywhere. But if I consider the total quantity of money flowing through the market, dominated by the 2016 pandas, I see good market health.

What I think is happening is everyone is buying the 2016 30 g silver pandas because they expect them to be viewed in the future like the 1983 27 g silver pandas - a historic and potentially valuable "first". With so much attention on 2016 pandas, it's difficult to conclude that pandas in general are weak, but seeing such low prices on older and rarer pandas is pretty convincing evidence that they're being ignored a little more than they should be. Smarter buyers like us are having no competition in buying super-rare coins like the baby pandas, even though prices have gone up from $110 to $180+ for uncertified specimens during the last 6 months or so. Although 1 of the 2 brass baby pandas from luckmoneyro has sold already, there is still one sitting around waiting for a buyer for nearly an entire week: 221996675154. Why is it still unsold? I think it's because the crowd is grabbing 2016 pandas instead, because they expect them to be the rare ones. In other words, they're buying the wrong coins!

I am not optimistic that the China mint will succeed in keeping people interested in pandas for very long after they have been debased, and I think a lot of other people either agree with that, or they disagree and think they'll be successful and later mintages will be much higher. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

The price is low for the 2016 30 g silver pandas, and people's expectation of rarity appears poised to backfire, if the entire 8 million mintage sells out completely. Instead of being rare, all the misguided buyers are unintentionally positioning the 2016 pandas to be a success. So, what I think is going to happen is the China mint will see encouraging sales results from the debased 2016 pandas, and they will increase mintages for 2017. For a while, the buyers will think they made the right choice to speculate on increased value for the 2016 pandas, but eventually that enthusiasm will fizzle when inflation starts causing rises in precious metals, and the numismatic premium of the 2016 pandas gets erased by the increases in the metal value.

After that happens, people will realize they would have made more money if they had just bought the cheap and dirtiest bullion available, instead of "fancy bullion" like the pandas. So, to fix that mistake, they will try to sell their 2016 pandas...and that's when they will get the bad news that no one wants to buy them for the full bullion value because they're non-standard weights. Disappointment will turn into frustration, and frustration will turn into anger as inflation soars and people start THINKING about what it means for fiat to be debased. Then, that will be the end of debased pandas, and the entire series will be angrily rejected as yet another insulting attempt to exploit people's trust.

In contrast, I did another search for 2016 silver pandas recently sold on ebay, and I found 1267 of them! Wow! That's a huge difference. Why are the 30 g silver pandas selling well, but not the 30 g gold? Is it because there are a few dealers bring large numbers of the silver ones to the market, certified in PCGS and NGC holders? As you can see from the sales above, the 30 g gold sold more often when it was certified. I decided to check how many of each were currently being offered for sale. There are 421 silver listings, and 67 gold. That's a big difference, but it's not as big as the difference in actual sales. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the gold is not selling anywhere near as well as the silver is.

In trying to explain this, I think both the buyers aren't buying, and the sellers aren't selling. The reason that could happen is if the profit margins aren't good enough for the gold, so sellers have too-high prices, and buyers don't want to pay it. Maybe ebay fees are to blame. In both the silver and gold, I noticed that the certified coins were selling better, so that probably improves the profit margin enough for the silver, but it may still be insufficient for the gold. Naturally, the more expensive an item is, the bigger ebay's fees are. I think that might be apparent in the fact that there are a lot of cheap auctions for the silver, but none for gold. Sellers who are worried about profit margins, do not use cheap auctions to sell stuff.

That's all less surprising than I expected. I was hoping to find some clear evidence that nobody wants the 2016 30 g gold pandas, to contrast with the enormous popularity of the silver version, but the tiny sales of the gold are too easy to explain away. So, next I decided to compare them to 2015 pandas, to see if all this is perfectly normal. I found 163 2015 gold panda sales, versus 1309 2015 silver panda sales. So, it looks like a huge disparity in gold and silver sales means nothing.

Although it would seem that I wasted my time doing this research, I did actually learn something from it. Firstly, it appears silver is more popular than gold, which makes sense because more people can afford it. Secondly, high prices are probably discouraged on ebay, and I suspect most sales above $1000 end up completing off-ebay...or just never end up completing, because buyers and sellers don't find each other if they don't use ebay. Furthermore, price barriers are a real thing, and guess what? There are huge price barriers at $1000 and $1500, which is right around the value of 30 grams of gold:

davidt3251 has complained in the past about the difficulty of selling expensive gold pandas, and I think this research not only confirms it's true, it also telling us there are multiple and completely different reasons for the difficulty. Maybe this is why most of my investments are in silver coins.

2005 1 kg silver panda NGC 61 sold in a Best Offer option: 171511746762 (price reveal). I'm impressed that such a low grade still sold. Every time I see sales like this I think, "The buyer must be a collector". Although prices are low in cheap auctions, I'm seeing plenty of Buy-It-Now and Best Offer option sales, so I think I will just have to conclude that the cheap auctions are still not doing well due to the large volume of fraudulent spam that creates a barrier for potential bidders who can't find stuff they want to bid on. So, instead of waiting for a cheap auction, they're buying in Buy-It-Nows and Best Offer options.

2015 2 oz silver lunar goat panda matte antiqued NGC 67 sold in a Best Offer option: 161891939450 (price reveal). This was a fantastic price. I paid a lot more for mine, and mine are the same quality, but not even certified.

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 1010 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 1.09 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

2015 2 oz silver lunar goat panda matte antiqued NGC 67 sold in a Best Offer option: 161891939450 (price reveal). This was a fantastic price. I paid a lot more for mine, and mine are the same quality, but not even certified.

"You have to choose (as a voter) between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government.And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold." - George Bernard Shaw -

Hi Jens, I took a look at your NGC census link, and I couldn't find any meaningful information in NGC's database because NGC seems to still not understand the basics of the concept of numismatic types. I made a screenshot of what I see, just in case you see something different. I couldn't find the phrase "PFMA" anywhere on that page. I think "PFMA" probably stands for "proof" and "matte", and I see that NGC still thinks that is designation information, when it is actually type information. At least it does appear that NGC is beginning to figure out that it's not grade information. That is progress, sort of. There are only a few more ways they can screw this up, so if they keep making random changes, eventually they will get it right.

To answer your question of what a 2015 2 oz silver lunar goat panda matte antiqued NGC 68 might be worth, I would guess somewhere around $600. However, NGC's grading is so wildly inconsistent with antiqued coins, I think a nice specimen might be able to get a 69 grade from PCGS. It might be worth holding out for a PCGS 69 instead of an NGC 68. One strategy I may use for myself is to buy nice specimens and cross them over to PCGS. Maybe one of the NGC 68's would be able to upgrade to 69 at PCGS?

i saw something different when i posted but the guys at NGC seem to have fubar'd their site again. I noticed that they seem to be undergoing a redesign and it seems sometimes they just don't get it right at first.Didn't see it coming so i didn't take a picture but in the version i saw you could see the types like 2015 Panda Goat PFUC and 2015 Panda Goat PFMA.Now i agree, it's completely useless for the time being.

Anyway, thanks for your input.From what i hear many people say PCGS grading is supposed to be stricter, don't you think that is true (anymore)? Or are the antiqued coins an exception?

"You have to choose (as a voter) between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government.And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold." - George Bernard Shaw -

This is a good example of the 1990 2 g silver dragon & phoenix being damaged by use in jewelry: 262251686395.

Beware, a lot of legitimate sellers are unknowingly selling fake silver pandas as genuine. Unless you're an expert, it's not safe to buy uncertified silver pandas right now. Mostly recent dates from 2000 to 2016 are being faked. There are a lot of fake 5 oz silver pandas and lunars from all dates, but those are easier to identify as fake because the genuine ones are so rare, and the criminals did a crappy job copying them. If a seller says they "have no idea how much silver is in it", then you know they know it is fake. There are a lot of great deals on ebay cheap auctions right now, but silver NEVER sells for below bullion value, not even big silver. Big gold will sometimes sell for below bullion value, but not big silver. If silver is selling for below bullion value, it's because all the smart rich bidders that can afford to pay the full bullion value know it is fake, and they are not bidding - only the poor cheapskate schlubs think they get lucky on silver at below market value.

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 1025 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 1.13 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

2002 1 oz silver panda PCGS 70 sold in a Best Offer option: 151957437455 (price reveal). From thincat00. This PCGS 70 and the one above, both sold within a few minutes of each other, probably to the same buyer.

There have been a LOT of expensive Buy-It-Now and Best Offer option sales since the last update. That's normal for weekends, but I'm noticing something different this time. This time, there are not as many new coins being listed in cheap auctions as I would normally expect. I have the overall impression that the supply of cheap coins is drying up, because more money is coming to the market since the Chinese and USA stock markets crashed. Buyers are grabbing expensive coins, and it's strange to see so many expensive Buy-It-Now sales when there are so few newly listed cheap auctions.

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 1025 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 1.04 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

Looking forward to using the new CC forum. I appreciate all the hard work badon.

Is this post intended to continue pretty much the same as it did before, only now with the option to create new topics along side it? Or is the plan for this post to resume only temporarily as a sort of catchall while others transition into the new forum starting their own posts?

Also, I came across this auction ending today. 221998262684. Was curious if anyone had any info or thoughts on these Macau Panda Expo coins.

*If there was a more appropriate place for me to post this please let me know. If anyone is going to post in the wrong place it's bound to be me.

2014 brass baby panda for only $170: 262007631878. luckmoneyro's price is $180. This coin has gone unnoticed because it doesn't have any descriptive information to make it show up in searches.

This seller thinks if he uses gloves, he can handle the coins without damaging them: 331761672976. He is wrong. Handling ALWAYS damages the coins, even when done by an expert. In this case, the seller is using powdered rubber gloves. The powder makes it easier to get the gloves on and off, but it's also abrasive, and the powder residue is difficult to completely remove from the coins without damaging them. The powder usually stays forever, and slowly continues to damage the coins for centuries. The coins would literally be better preserved underground or at the bottom of the ocean, instead of being in the hands of unsophisticated childish people that like to play with the coins.

2015 2 oz silver panda Macau expo NGC 69 sold in a cheap auction: 391368389579. This might have been the one AbeLinkin won.

2012 1 oz silver panda ANA expo PCGS 69 sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price: 141796276900. A few weeks back in November 2015 you could have bought a 70 in a cheap auction for substantially less money than this: 111829487370. Prices appear to be rising. There were similar low prices in Buy-It-Now and Best Offer option listings: 291629087306 (price reveal). Either way, cheap auctions are still the best way to get the lowest possible price, but they are greatly reducing in number lately. GREATLY reducing in number.

1993 1 oz silver panda NGC 68 sold in a Best Offer option: 351619408230 (price reveal). The supply of early date coins are drying up, and they're being replaced with huge numbers of recently minted coins. That means the reduced number of cheap auctions I'm seeing is boosted by the recently minted coins.

I don't know anything about this, but it's very expensive!: 331757979426.

ebay has been more aggressive in dealing with fraudulent sellers. Normally the criminals have no resistance in their fraud schemes, but now I'm seeing many of the know bad sellers are having their accounts deleted. That is encouraging. There are fewer spam listings than ever before in this update!

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 823 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 0.91 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

dragonzeng168 put the 70 on ebay: 161959219276. That has an "exhibition price", which means it's priced so high, it's "not for sale". He also put a 69 there for a much more reasonable price, with a Best Offer option: 161959583025. You should be able to get it with an offer of around $2500.

The Chen Jian 1980 silver God of Longevity NGC 70 is an unobtainable "dream coin" that we'll have to wait for dragonzeng168 to get bored of before someone else will have the opportunity to buy it.

1987 silver God of Longevity in a cheap auction: 131719349650. These are hard to buy at low prices. They're popular, and they're usually low grade and expensive. This might sell for less than you can a buy a certified low grade one for.

There are 700 fewer spammy listings, and 200 fewer legitimate listings, compared to the previous update about a week ago. Most of the decrease in legitimate listings is probably because the quantity of 2016 30 g silver pandas has been reduced. Sure enough, there were about 200 of the 2016 silver pandas sold in the last week. Many of them were uncertified, at rock-bottom prices of around $22 each. At their introduction in late December 2015, the uncertified 2016 30 g silver panda coins have increased only about $1 from $22 to $23. Certified 69 grades have dropped from around $40 to $45 back then, to around $30 to $35 today. The 70 grades held steady at about $50 to this day. As usual, there were plenty of highs and lows outside those price ranges that were isolated flukes.

Of the spammy listings, the drop is absolutely incredible at 700 fewer since my last update! The reason? ebay has been cleaning out the bad sellers. In the past, I would almost neve seen a fraudulent seller banned from ebay, with their account deleted. I accumulated a list of around 800 bad sellers before I started seeing an error message that says the seller's account does not exist when I tried to filter them out of my links. This is good news!

There are still plenty of spammy and fraudulent sellers, but it's nowhere near as difficult to find legitimate auction listings now. With the stock markets hurting, precious metals moving up, and safe hard assets like coins drawing attention from cash-burdened investors, the market is poised for some exciting action! This is the lowest number of bad listings I have seen since 2012 or 2013! WOW! Are we ready for some fun? Are we?! Oh yes! We waited patiently, and the smartest of us accumulated and kept buying. Now the bad sellers no longer dominate the market. All the money they were sucking out of it has ceased! At the same time, the supply of legitimate listings is also somewhat decreased, so buyers have lots of cash to buy, but much less to choose from! Even more so at the low end of the market.

I think the 2016 pandas sold incredibly well when they were released, and it's entirely possible that all 8 million in the mintage are gone, or the sellers are going to raise prices. I had mentioned this possibility in the past, and I think we're seeing it happen right in front of us. Everyone is buying these debased pandas because they're gambling on investment bets that ALL are to the upside. The people like me who think the metric weight will flop due to market rejection are buying them because we think they'll end up as historical curiosities. The people who think China has the clout to make the metric weight a success are buying them because then they would be the first, and lowest mintage of the new panda series. In other words, all bets appear to be good bets, which almost never happens.

What DOES happen is China giving us a surprise increase in mintage. People hate it when China promises a fixed mintage, and then breaks that promise, but that's China. The USA and many other countries do things a bit differently by not fixing the mintage. They keep minting them until either people stop buying, or the year ends. Despite the irritation China causes when they break the fixed-mintage promise, the good thing about it is China's way makes it much easier to predict which coins will be the rare ones. Of course, China usually takes some off the top by giving us higher prices from the beginning, but they didn't do that in the case of the 2016 metric pandas. They entered the market dirt cheap, and I personally think China will NOT break their "low" 8 million mintage promise, so next year in 2017 they can say "Look, the 2016 pandas doubled in value in only a few months!". Naturally, that will help sales of 2017 pandas too.

I think the metric pandas are highly likely to fizzle after 2016. The China mint is notoriously tenacious in trying to tell the market which coins should be the valuable ones, and the market is even more notoriously tenacious in telling China to go sell their junk to somebody else. In every previous case during the last 37 years, metric weights have failed. It has been tried, over, and over, and over, and the market always rejects it. China is more patient (or slower to learn!), and maybe eventually they will prevail with metric weights, but I doubt it.

However, it doesn't matter as far as the SHORT TERM investment potential of the 2016 30 g silver pandas is concerned, as long as China does not break their 8 million mintage promise. No matter what actually happens, 8 million is too small of a mintage for the 30 g silver pandas because, at the low prices they're selling for now, they're too cheap, and far too interesting to ignore. This is even more true for the smallest 2016 1 g gold metric pandas, which sold out almost immediately at their introduction. The 1 g gold might end up being permanently successful, even if the short term gains in the 30 g silver don't keep up with silver prices over the long term.

For myself, I haven't bought any 2016 pandas, but I'm studying them intensely because they're good clues about what will happen next. My bets are that the prototypes for the metric pandas, the baby pandas, will be the biggest winner in the panda series from all this drama and controversy about metric weights, regardless of what happens. However, I think the worst case scenario is that collectors start to turn away from pandas, and then all of the cultural coins will come back in fashion! We're already seeing this happen with the gods and lunars, and it's very plausible that this trend could continue until the lunars or something else takes the #1 flagship position AWAY FROM THE PANDAS!

Remember, the lunars were originally intended to be the China mint's #1 flagship series, but they fizzled due to the sub-standard weights. Then, when Peter Anthony wrote his first edition of his panda book, that was all it took to send the pandas soaring to the #1 spot. Another thing to remember is that Chinese people like diversity and variety. The lunars, gods, and many other types never completely went away, and the pandas won't either. Instead, they take turns in the spotlight, but even when they're not in the spotlight, the keys still do what keys always do - rise in value. Therefore, even though recognize the possibility that pandas might become passe for a while in the next few years, I still decided to make my biggest investments in pandas. I spent more on pandas alone in 2015 than I did on all coin types combined in 2014.

The only way to be sure you're always going to win is to diversify.

===============================================================================I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers. 823 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 0.50 to 1.

Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.

1990 silver goldfish red high-head NGC 69 sold in a Best Offer option: 401061700841 (price reveal). It appears this Best Offer option listing sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price. Why? Because it's way too cheap, perhaps by as much as $200 too cheap. The 4 coin set sells for around $2000 or more right now (if you can find one), so it wouldn't be hard to extrapolate a value of around $500 for this coin. So, why did stageleft22 sell it so cheap? Good question. I suspect he hasn't noticed the recent price increased for the 1990 set, since I published rarity data that showed the currently known surviving population to be as rare or maybe even rarer than the 1984 silver pagoda set that sells for $4000:

Also, according to the CC's grade rarity information in CCT757: 1990 20 g silver goldfish 4 coin set, the red high-head is one of the least difficult coins to find in a 69 grade, so it naturally would be less valuable than the coins in the set that have more grade rarity. Still, I think this coin might have sold for as much as $700 in a cheap auction, with a little luck. Whoever grabbed it really scored, and I think that's why they didn't bother to use the Best Offer option. Being the first to see this coin is enough luck, and being greedy means the second person to see it might grab it before your Best Offer option gets accepted. If I had seen this coin, I would have grabbed it for the full Buy-It-Now asking price too.

I didn't check to see if this might be a variety I don't have, but I have had little luck finding varieties for this type. They were very well minted, which makes sense considering they typically grade better than most of the other coins in the set too. If I bought it, and I didn't need it for my collection, I would have probably flipped it for $400 to $500, and called it good. Congrats to the buyer! It pains me to say that because I love the goldfish so much, and I'm very jealous, but I am happy the new owner has made profitable purchase, thanks to the fact the buyer read my information, and the seller probably did not. Knowledge is power.

This is weird: 351639410883. I checked the revision history for that 1984 silver pagoda set, and ebay intervened to moved it to the wrong category! It has a Best Offer option on it, and only 3 watchers. I'd say your odds are good for getting your offer accepted at some low-ball price because so few people will ever see it when it's in the wrong category.